TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

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Renaissance humanism inasmuch as they are thought to hold Malatesta‘s inspired powers of interpretation at their ethical centre. In taking issue with Rainey‘s assertion that Pound‘s research into the Malatesta manuscripts in Rimini only indicated his faith in the benevolence of encultured patrons I am implicitly questioning the simple thought that Pound held a religious vision of human communication, one that is ultimately tethered by his faith in the transcendental authority of divinely inspired acts of augury. I am also supporting a form of materialism that understands the need to focus on the materiality of texts and the textuality of material, informed by Pierre Bourdieu‘s identification of those salient features of the ―symbolic alchemy‖ out of which the abstaining artist invests work for profit. Bourdieu specifically theorizes Pound‘s received stance – that of a carbuncular yet isolated intriguer for the arts. Rules of Art offers a somewhat Darwinian vision of human struggle in the creation of avant-garde cultural positions. Cunard‘s engagement in the material production of the Malatesta Cantos undermines Rainey‘s vision of Pound as a solitary artist struggling to find the ―legitimate categories of perception and appreciation‖ in his attempt to assert dominance within a cultural field (157). Bourdieu argues, though, that aesthetic creation never really happens via individual geniuses but that the field of cultural production treats creation as such, thereby ―producing‖ the notions of creativity that authorize individual authors. While Pound and Cunard certainly do search for legitimate ways to instantiate their shared appreciation for socialist viewpoints, Rainey has obvious difficulty (or, it simply is not his interest) seeing how the imaginative quotation of a letter by the type- cutter Hieronymous Soncinus in ―Canto XXX‖ helped Pound form a new ―institutional concept‖ of the avant-garde; the creation of such a concept being the ―prize‖ allotted to 145
the winners of its game (148). Because Pound chooses to legitimize a close and detailed appreciation for the materiality of cultural production, both by the way he poetically foregrounds a transcribed letter referring to the network of intrigues between national politics and domestic economics of Renaissance Italy, and for how this alludes to his own collaborations with Cunard, A Draft of XXX Cantos inherently challenges Rainey‘s understanding of how Pound recast his authority by insisting on the inseparability of the symbolic and material functions of art. Cunard‘s garnering of information pertinent to the Malatesta Cantos and her work as their printer speaks to a degree of collaboration that asks us to reconsider the assumed irreducibility of symbolic and material production as well. Bourdieu notes that this kind of encoding of symbolic significance in the materials of textual production defies our uncritical common-sense understanding of how literary meaning circulates in a transcendent realm of pure ―culture.‖ This common sense perpetuated the illusion, Bourdieu argues, of ―[t]he irreducibility of the work of symbolic production to the act of material fabrication performed by the artist‖ (156). Rainey defends his particular approach to uncovering the institutional socialité of the production of the Malatesta Cantos in the introduction to Monument. He argues for the importance of exploring some of the relationships that gave Pound his access to the materials and manuscripts that inform his work, drawing our attention to the problems that had grown out of treating difficult modernist poetry as though it were just an abstract linguistic game that is played, ultimately, to the reader‘s frustration to form coherent meaning. Rainey‘s dislike of abstract verse gives him a very practical reason to employ theories about the value of describing texts by the lights of their material and institutional modes of production. Institutions argues that when we fail to include the author‘s 146
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TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHET
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Christopher David Chapman practice.
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CONTENTS PREFACE ..................
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objectification, while titles are a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to ack
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taboo, as the following remark indi
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emind us too hastily only of Benjam
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e renewed in philosophical contempl
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the word “Title.” I do this out
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where fate - the agent of nature‟
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Cantos with Nancy Cunard. The final
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come into their meaning through the
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meaning in the words he appoints to
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―The Role of Language in Trauersp
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God‘s genetic ―pure word,‖ re
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conceived of as a pantomime where t
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ensnared within post-lapsarian syst
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aspects of his linguistic theory th
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decision-making powers, we can demo
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him to transpose arguments about th
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Caesar‖ is an obvious case in poi
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eath of this world, and from it the
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magnanimity wins out in dire and pa
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elegated to the setting in which th
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Notes 1 In an early, unpublished, t
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every locution being, in essence, e
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CHAPTER TWO: LONG SERIES OF TRANSLA
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dramatic monologue, a feat he would
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terms that this chapter wishes to c
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structural factitiousness that the
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is implicit to baroque criticisms o
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meaning of the poems it collects. P
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Pound's fragments as commentary on
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Few critics read these poems in the
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a diorama booth in which his hero a
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the genetic milieu into which it be
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In fact, two complaints can be hear
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while keeping lines that praise Bro
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Cantos deliver a poetic condition i
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Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGan
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George Steiner uncovers the ramific
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to register history differently to
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commitment to past modes of critica
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modern poet. Pound exhorted Barry t
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the case, is deliberately making ou
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Pound's genius was to see Propertiu
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delineate Pound's portrayals as fai
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presence of a continuous patina of
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described by Christine Brooke-Rose.
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10) of their rows over fidelity. Fo
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obsessive desire most critics find
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Page 105 and 106: Propertius as Propertius once had C
Page 107 and 108: saw no viable future for his own ex
Page 109 and 110: then, these imaginary aesthetes wer
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Page 115 and 116: itself a Western bourgeois assumpti
Page 117 and 118: subject. Deleuze's 1977 discussion
Page 119 and 120: his subjectivity as a blend of fact
Page 121 and 122: eak occurs in the poet's mind as th
Page 123 and 124: dogmatic binding and over which to
Page 125 and 126: Pound‘s impersonality, to use the
Page 127 and 128: Mill, Jackson notes, finds the conc
Page 129 and 130: apostrophe to ‗Misery‘ performa
Page 131 and 132: ―Mauberley,‖ the poem‘s narra
Page 133 and 134: to posit a fictional author being n
Page 135 and 136: neither Rainey‘s Institutions of
Page 137 and 138: y Piero della Francesca. Pound was
Page 139 and 140: E gradment li antichi cavaler roman
Page 141 and 142: that have not traditionally been co
Page 143 and 144: The library of the dukes of Milan w
Page 145 and 146: Rainey‘s disdain for bourgeois hi
Page 147 and 148: Bornstein, for example, is interest
Page 149 and 150: the meaning of Pound‘s text by co
Page 151 and 152: Do come, do come. I can see us at B
Page 153: the political implications of that
Page 157 and 158: iography and how he can be seen to
Page 159 and 160: to him is plain: ―News of Nancy?
Page 161 and 162: view of Pound‘s political beliefs
Page 163 and 164: which to describe the force of natu
Page 165 and 166: interrogation of that two-word theo
Page 167 and 168: elationships that they believed to
Page 169 and 170: commemoration is to writing (Derrid
Page 171 and 172: knowable “as a combination of ato
Page 173 and 174: new‖ emerges: ―it is a movement
Page 175 and 176: ejects any teleological argument fo
Page 177 and 178: Ontologies, such as those that belo
Page 179 and 180: this mystery could only be experien
Page 181 and 182: attention to the way names effect t
Page 183 and 184: Adorno acknowledges that Kant‘s w
Page 185 and 186: understanding how de-personalizatio
Page 187 and 188: Fate becomes a term that Benjamin i
Page 189 and 190: WORKS CITED Arkins, Bryan. ―Pound
Page 191: The New Age. 27.26, 1919. Ovid. The
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